Marie Antoinette, Madame Royale, and Princesse de Guéméné

Marie Thérèse gives her mother a kiss as she's led away by her governess - at Le Hameau.

"Marie Antoinette and Her Daughter" by Joseph Caraud I like his work. His interest in portraying "anecdotal" moments in daily life remind me of Norman Rockwell who did the same later and in a different culture.

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had four children*, two girls and two boys, of which Marie-Thérèse was the eldest. She's reported to have been a persnickety little girl, haughty at times. Once, when her mother fell off a horse, she told a member of the court she wouldn't mind if her mother were killed. The man, horrified (and probably a little delighted if he was one of the many members of the Court who disliked Marie Antoinette) asked if she knew what that meant and the little girl replied something to the effect of "Yes, it means she wouldn't be here anymore" and wouldn't be able to tell her what to do. Children say things they don't mean, or understand, sometimes. Memoirists may've recorded the more negative anecdotes about the child, Madame Royale, because they stood out to the writer. Maybe she wasn't what  in my day, would've been called "a brat."

At Marie Thérèse's birth, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were disappointed their first child was a female because only a male secure the throne for XVI's family line. Once, Madame Royale, as she was know, touchingly asked her father if he'd love her more if she were a boy. Louis XVI, with tears in his eyes, assured his daughter that wasn't the case.

Marie-Thérèse was depicted as something of a bitter recluse in her later years. Who wouldn't be when they'd spent more than five years of their youth in prison and lost both parents to the guillotine? All three of her siblings died, one, Louis-Charles, quite tragically. After the Revolution, she was taken to her mother's home country of Austria, then married off to her first cousin, on her father's side. They returned to France and went into exile off and on.

This is kind of a weird post. Somehow I turned a tender moment into a tale of tragedy. I got off on a tangent about the royal children but deleted it all because I'd gotten carried away. 

There's just a lot to say. For example, the Princesse de Guéméné was a member of the influential and wide-reaching Rohan family, and a close friend of Marie Antoinette's. She led the Queen astray with gambling parties, horse races, and the dissolute lifestyle for which the Queen was frequently castigated by her many advisors and critics. The Princesse had to be released from her position of Governess due to of the scandal of her husband's financial ruin. She was replaced by the Duchesse de Polignac, Marie Antoinette's closest friend at the time, a choice widely criticized because the Duchesse was elevated to the post above the person who should've, hereditarily, been appointed. Plus, she was considered another bad influence and Marie Antoinette had spent a fortune on her and her family members already. 

I don't have time to find exact quotes and pictures to illustrate them. I'll just leave it here.

* They also had at least three adopted children that I'm aware of. One, a village boy who fell between the wheels of Marie Antoinette's carriage, was adopted off the street. She, childless and impetuous, provided an income for the grandmother who was raising him. The peasant boy howled and kicked up quite a fuss at the change in his fortune. I'd have to check the details but I believe he grew up to be a strident revolutionary.